My favorite sentence from John Siracusa’s epic review of Mac OS X Lion is this one:

Apple appears tired of dragging people kicking and screaming into the future; with Lion, it has simply decided to leave without us.

And nowhere in Lion is this more apparent than what appears to be everyone’s least favorite feature: inverted scrolling on the trackpad. As I’m sure you know, what this means is that scrolling now mirrors how it works on iOS devices: you essentially drag the content up and down the screen, as opposed to moving the viewport of the application like we’re used to.

I love this change - it took me about 5 minutes to get used to it. But I appear to be in the minority with this opinion. It sounds like the first thing most people do once Lion is installed is head over to Settings and change it back to the old way of scrolling. So I’d like to step back a little and use this change to talk about UI conventions and when it’s ok to change them. To do that, let’s first look at what we know about Apple’s direction for their operation systems.

Data Is The Future

We got our first glimpse into Apple’s future at WWDC, where John Gruber summed up the keynote as follows:

Googl’s frame is the browser window. Appl’s frame is the screen. That’s what w’ll remember about today’s keynote ten years from now.

Robert X. Cringely touched on the implications of this in an article about Facebook where he says this:

The trend is clear from “the computer is the computer” through “the network is the computer” to what’s next, which I believe is “the data is the computer.”

The point is this. Up to now the metaphor we’ve had about computers is that data = files, and we view this data through windows (with a small “w”). We then manipulate these windows around to get things done. With the introduction of iOS, Apple noticed that the metaphor is not only unnecessary, it’s also not the most effective way to do things.

Instead, Apple wants us to remove the current abstraction from our data (the file system and the “window”), and instead focus on and interact with the data itself. Our data no longer has to be served to us through a middleman - we can go straight to the source. In this context, inverting scrolling behavior makes total sense. Why would you move a window around to see data that sits somewhere behind it, when you can manipulate that data directly? If the data is the computer, scrolling down should move your words down the page, not up.

Inverted scrolling is only one piece of the puzzle. Full-screen mode, disappearing scroll bars, auto-save - these are all new features in Lion that build on this fundamental shift away from file-based computing to data-based computing[1].

But there is a problem with this shift, as we’ve seen from the outcry. People are used to doing things a certain way, and you can’t just go ahead and change that without asking permission. So how do you deal with a change like this?

Floppy Disks And UI Conventions

Another example of this kind of conundrum is the trusted old “save” icon - the floppy disk. My 2-year old daughter will probably never see a floppy disk in her entire life, yet she will learn that the floppy disk icon = save action. Some have tried to change this - recently David Friedman proposed a baseball home plate as replacement icon.

But getting every software developer (and user) in the world to adopt a new standard like this seems nearly impossible. So, we’re stuck with the floppy disk for now[2], even though it is an outdated metaphor, similar to how scrolling currently works.

So this is where we need to go back to the theory. In essence, reversing scrolling behavior lines up with one of the fundamental heuristics of UI design: there has to be a match between the system and the real world:

The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.

There is a tension here. Users are familiar with the current concept of scrolling. Yet, I’ve tried to argue above that the new way is actually more natural and logical. Apple is essentially caught in the middle of this UI heuristic, and they had to make a choice. So the question becomes, when is it ok to change what’s familiar to something that’s different but more natural and logical?

You’ve Got To Leave It Behind

The answer is that you make such a change when you believe it’s part of a much bigger trend in computing, and you’re willing to take the negative backlash because you know you’re doing it for the greater good. Ok, stop rolling your eyes. Yes, I’ve been accused of drinking the Apple Kool-Aid just a little bit too much lately. But hear me out, and re-read that Seracusa quote in the beginning of this post.

Apple is undeniable moving iOS and Mac OS X closer to each other. And in their future, direct manipulation of the data (primarily through touch) is at the center of a larger computing shift first introduced by the iPad. So they are making this tough call now, saying, “this is where we’re going, don’t get left behind.”

In short, I implore you to take John Gruber’s advice on this:

My number one Lion tip: No matter how wrong it feels, stick with the new trackpad scrolling direction. Give it a week.

Six months from now I think we’ll look back at Lion and iOS 5 as the operating systems that ushered us into the era of the data as the computer. And we’ll be better for it.

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1. Apps like Notational Velocity have been going this route for a while, where the file system is completely hidden. You don’t interact with it at all, unless you really want to.↩
2. At least until all developers follow Apple and Google Docs (to a certain extent) and replace save icons with auto-save options.↩

I like Google+. I like it because it’s clean and well-designed. I like it because it feels fresh - like moving into a new neighborhood after the one you came from got taken over by fake farms and endless profile picture changes. But most of all I like it because it’s quiet.

Since it’s in limited Beta it means it’s still mostly populated by early adopters. So I can interact with brands like Mashable and Smashing Magazine and feel like I’m part of the conversation - something you can’t really do on Twitter and Facebook with mass-brands like that.

This thing is going to be huge

But alas, this will probably not last. Sooner or later the floodgates will open, and before you know it the once pristine Google+ neighborhood will once again get overrun and fall prey to the meaningless graffiti that also transformed Facebook from social network to chaotic metaverse. Rocky Agrawal sums it perfectly in When Google Circles Collide:

[Google+] doesn’t do anything to solve the biggest problem with social networks today: increasing the signal to noise ratio.

So the masses will descend, and we’ll be back to hunting for pockets of information among the endless streams of data. I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

Well, maybe it won’t be such a big deal

I could be wrong. The smart money might actually be on betting that Google+ never even gets enough adoption to become the loud mess that Facebook is today. The reason for that lies in an article that made the rounds a few weeks ago, A Brief History Of The Corporation:

Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.

But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.

What does this mean? Google+ time has to be stolen from Facebook time. And good luck with that, Google. It’s all because we have this stupid thing called limited time:

Each new “well” of attention runs out sooner. Every human mind has been mined to capacity using attention-oil drilling technologies. To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources.

So that’s the real problem for Google. Theirs can’t be an acquisition strategy, because most people who are on a social network are already on Facebook. So it will have to be a migration strategy. As Dare Obasanjo put it:

For Google+ to be successful it means people will need to find enough utility in the site that it takes away from their usage of Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps even replaces one of these sites in their daily routine. So far it isn’t clear why any regular person would do this.

Google+ wants Circles to be the thing that convinces users to switch. They’re betting that enough users will want to share different things with different groups of people that they’re willing to give up their networks and start a new one. I just don’t think that’s a strong enough argument. Coming back to Agrawal’s point: the real problem is how to get better signal out of the noise of social networks. That’s a need that no one has filled yet.

There’s a parallel to the tablet market here. Trying to compete with the iPad is absolutely futile - you will lose. Instead, HP has a very smart strategy with their TouchPad:

HP acknowledged Appl’s dominance in the tablet market, but said Apple wasn’t its target with the TouchPad.

“We think ther’s a better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs,” said Kerris. “This market is in it’s infancy and there is plenty of room for both of us to grow.”

They looked for a gap in the market, and they’re working actively to fill it. So it’s certainly not impossible that enough people migrate to Google+ for Metcalfe’s Law to kick in and we start to see some real network utility. But it’s going to be a tough sell unless they find that real gap in the market.

So which one is it?

Which way do I want it go? I’m on the fence. For now I’m enjoying the peace and quiet in the new neighborhood. But that can also get boring pretty quickly. So I want my cake and eat it too. I want Google+ to scale and at the same time figure out how to solve the signal to noise problem in social media. Is that too much to ask?

South African movie site Ster Kinekor just relaunched their web site to much fanfare. Much of the discussion I’ve seen on Twitter about the new site is about their decision to remain completely reliant on Flash. I agree with all the technology arguments against Flash, but I want to take a slightly different approach here and talk about Flash as an enabler of bad user experience.

You see, Flash is like the guy who keeps giving your alcoholic uncle a drink while the rest of the family is trying so hard to help him get sober. Every time he gets close to quitting he gets “one more drink” from somewhere and falls back into bad habits. And this is what Flash is to user experience.

Every time you might get close to following standard UI conventions or have a simple flow, Flash comes in to whisper sweet animatic nothings in your ear… “Just one more flyout,” it says. “Just one more hover state - come on, everybody’s doing it.” Designing a boring old button? “No man,” says Flash, “we can make this thing move and light up with Flash, wouldn’t that be cool?”

And before you know it, you have this:

In my view, most of the user experience issues with the old Ster Kinekor site have not been addressed in the redesign. For example:

• There is no visual hierarchy on the site. Everything is important, so nothing is important. I just don’t know where I’m supposed to click.
• Animations are intrusive and adds to the confusion.
• Standard UI conventions are ignored. Buttons don’t look like buttons, links don’t look like links (links are grey on the site…).
• Forms are non-standard and not easy to fill out. For example, the checkout flow uses skeuomorphic design to make the credit card look like a real card, but it’s just confusing. And you can’t copy and paste your card number from a different document.

There are more issues, but that’s not really what this post is about. This post is a call to cutt off Flash as a primary development technology on a web site, not just because it’s slow, difficult for SEO, doesn’t work on iOS, and all the other technical arguments against it.

We need to cut off Flash mostly because it makes it way too easy to design bad user experiences. The web is undeniably moving beyond Web 2.0 (whatever that was) and into an era where simple designs that put content first provide the best user experience. And Flash simply doesn’t fit that mold.

Perhaps the most succinct summary of Monday’s Apple WWDC keynote is this tweet by Dustin Curtis:

I understand the sentiment, and a lot of the post-keynote blog posts echoed this general statement. The most measured response, in my view, came from Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper:

If Reading List gets widely adopted and millions of people start saving pages for later reading, a portion of those people will be interested in upgrading to a dedicated, deluxe app and service to serve their needs better. And they’ll quickly find Instapaper in the App Store.

I’m certainly not going to stop using Instapaper. I’m deeply invested in the service and can’t see myself moving to Safari any time soon. But that’s beside the point. Here’s the point.

I find it strange that people are freaking out about how Apple is going after successful apps and integrating them deeply into Lion and iOS. Here’s Rich Mulholland (well, censored a little bit):

For my part, I agree much more with Justin Williams when he says:

Some people grow frustrated by Apple continually making inroads in existing developer’s territory, but it comes with being a part of the platform. The key is to ensure your product lineup is diverse enough that you can survive taking the blow Apple may offer at the next keynote.

The Theory

And this is where we have to start talking about Sociology theory (No, don’t go away, this is going to be great!). One of the key concepts in Social Network Theory is Ronald Burt’s theory of ‘structural holes’. This theory aims to explain how competition works, and argues that networks provide two types of benefits: information benefits and control benefits.

• Information benefits refer to who knows about relevant information and how fast they find out about it. People with strong networks will generally know more about relevant subjects, and they will also know about it faster.
• Control benefits refer to the advantages of being an important player in a well-connected network. In a large network, central players have more bargaining power than other players, which also means that they can, to a large extent, control many of the information flows within the network.

Burt’s theory of structural holes aims to enhance these benefits to their full potential. A structural hole is “a separation between non-redundant contacts” (Burt, 1992). The holes between non-redundant contacts provide entrepreneurial opportunities that can enhance both the control benefits and the information benefits of networks.

To understand the role of structural holes in this regard, it is necessary to understand the concept of tertius gaudens. Taken from the work of George Simmel, the tertius gaudens is defined as “the third who benefits” (Simmel, 1923). It describes the person who benefits from the disunion of two others. For example, when two people want to buy the same product, the seller can play their bids against one another to get a higher price for the particular product.

Structural holes are the setting in which the tertius gaudens operates. An entrepreneur stepping into a structural hole at the right time will have the power and the control to negotiate the relationship between the two actors divided by the hole, most often by playing their demands against one another.

Apple’s Strategy

This is exactly what Apple is doing, and have been doing from the start when the first iPhone came out (maybe even before). They saw the structural hole between 3rd party developers and consumers, and walked right into it. Through the app store, they built an enormous network (information benefits) where they broker the relationship between developers and users (control benefits). By providing developers with a massive audience, they became “the third who benefits.”

I also don’t think they’ve been particularly secretive about this strategy, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to developers that if they have a one-platform strategy, and that platform is iOS, they might get disintermediated at some point.

Which brings us back to Marco Arment and Instapaper, and why I don’t think he’s in trouble. Instapaper is an ecosystem that’s intimately part of my workflow. It’s integrated with Firefox, iPhone, iPad, Twitter, Google Reader, Flipboard, Zite, … the list goes on. I’m not going to switch away, because I don’t see Instapaper as an iOS app. I see it as a solution to my reading needs.

So should developers still make iOS apps? Of course. But it’s important to realize that the product shouldn’t be the app. The product should be the problem you solve for users, on multiple platforms and in a simple, integrated way. Those are the apps that will survive (and even thrive) despite any changes that occur on Apple or another platform.

These are my notes from Oliver Rippel’s talk at NetProphet 2011. Oliver is the CEO of MIH, a group company overseeing African and Middle East online properties like Mocality and kalahari.net.

The state of e-commerce in Africa

• As soon as e-commerce becomes more than 1% of retail sales, that’s when it becomes mainstream
• US not the most successful e-commerce market - Korea is, with 9% of retail sales online. US is at 4%
• E-commerce in Africa is still nascent:
  • Egypt - 22% Internet penetration, less than 0.01% online retail penetration
  • Nigeria - 29% Internet penetration, less than 0.01% online retail penetration
  • South Africa
    • 6 million Internet users, 12% penetration
    • 0.4% online retail penetration
    • 16.7% credit card penetration
    • 14 e-commerce sites in Top 100 SA sites

Positive e-commerce macro-indicators in Africa

• Big average projected real GDP growth
• There is a growing middle class of 320m Africans
• High mobile penetration (World average: 60%; South Africa: 92%)
• The promise of accessible and affordable broadband Internet is there

Lessons for building a winning e-commerce business in Africa

MIH’s focus is on the full e-commerce value chain The brands cover the whole purchase cycle: awareness, interest, decision, action, post sale, resale

• Embrace mobile
• Leverage offline
  • Go where the users are - online marketing on its own simply won’t work
  • Go to shopping malls and put up posters - whatever works
• Cash is king
  • 50m million banks accounts in Africa, 95% of transactions are cash-based
  • The only mobile payment system that is scaling is M-Pesa in Kenya: P2P payments
  • They are converting a cash economy into a digital economy, so that can now also be used for e-commerce
• Build trust
  • Open marketplace model is inadequate in low trust early stage environment - unlike eBay
  • Instead, MIH uses controlled marketplaces that reduce barriers for buyers by building a trusted brand

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion just cut their earnings guidance for Q1 2011, blaming slower sales. Even as the future of RIM looks bleak from a US perspective, you wouldn’t think so looking at the South African market. BlackBerries are simply everywhere. I’ve always wondered why BlackBerry has such a large portion of the SA smartphone market, and I can think of two four reasons:

1. Most BlackBerry contracts come with unlimited free data, which (to my knowledge) no other smartphone handset does at a reasonable cost.
2. When it comes to business users, it’s still the only phone trusted by corporate IT departments.
3. A capable smartphone at a reasonable price (although an influx of cheaper Android and Nokia phones might make this a moot point). (Thanks Steyn for pointing this one out in the comments)
4. The popularity and cost-effectiveness of BBM (although WhatsApp largely takes this away as a selling point). (Thanks Stafford for pointing this one out)

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. The latest earnings guidance cut clearly spells big trouble for RIM, and in a great blog post on Forbes, Eric Jackson lists 10 questions he would ask CEO Jim Balsillie based on that news, including the following:

Your bullish analysts used to say “yes, the US business is dying but International is going to keep growing.” You seemed to be saying last night that demand is drying up in Latin America too.  Does that mean the US was a sign of what is to come for your future International growth?

Now combine that with a recent IDC report that predicts Africa would become the first truly post-PC continent:

IDC estimates that in South Africa, 800,000 PCs were shipped in 2010 and the number is expected to decline by about four percent annually to reach 650,000 by 2015. Meanwhile, 1.3 million handsets were shipped in 2010 and that rate is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nine percent to reach 2 million annually by 2015.

You have to ask yourself: how long can BlackBerry keep its apparent dominance in the smartphone market in South Africa? As mobile demand increases it appears that they will simply be unable to produce hardware that can keep up with consumers’ ever increasing smartphone requirements.

The “How Angry Birds would look on a BlackBerry” joke is funny, but there is certainly some truth behind the joke. As the line between work and life continues to blur, you don’t want a business phone that can also make calls. You want a personalised handset that can also be used for work. This is something RIM simply hasn’t figured out how to do, so they continue to double down on the “corporate security” angle. As Slate recently pointed out in a review of the PlayBook:

The incoherence, I think, is a sign of something deeper: Research in Motion doesn’t know what kind of company it wants to be. It made its fortune selling gadgets to chief information officers””IT guys who wanted to give their employees access to office e-mail on the go, but only in a way that accorded with corporate security policies. When they talk about RIM’s strengths, the company’s leaders like to point to their “CIO friendliness.”

The trouble is, being friendly with CIOs doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Nowadays people don’t ask the tech guy which mobile gadgets pass muster. Instead, tech guys look to employees to decide which gadgets to support. RIM’s strategy””to infiltrate companies as a first step to becoming a mass-market hit””has been eclipsed by the Apple approach, which is to infiltrate schools and homes, and then hope that regular people nag their IT guys to let them use iPads at work, too.

Meanwhile, Nokia appears to have given up on the US, but they’re coming for Africa in full force:

Nokia is already working with developers in several African countries and Peng feels that Nokia’s next big growth opportunity is to go beyond bringing affordable voice and SMS to delivering affordable web and applications.

“Rural populations live their lives largely outside of the reach of high quality services; through solutions like Nokia Data Gathering, we are already supporting field workers to collect, send and receive information quickly and securely via a mobile phone helping circumvent infrastructural challenges and speed up data collections needs in sectors such as health, agriculture, environmental conservation, population census and emergency services,” added Peng, in a press release sent after her speech.

It might not happen in the next few months, but I think there is a dangerous trend on the horizon for RIM. Between mobile handset growth in SA, trouble in the US market, and huge competition on the way, there’s a perfect storm brewing in BlackBerry land.

We’ve received quite a few questions about why we changed kalahari.net from a fluid layout to a 960px fixed width layout. There are pros and cons to both approaches, and Smashing Magazine did a great job of explaining those trade-offs in Fixed vs. Fluid vs. Elastic Layout: What’s The Right One For You?

For me, the most important reason to use a fixed layout is that it allows you to have full control over the experience and what the user sees on the screen.

But since a picture is worth a thousand words, I guess you can sum up the problem with fluid layouts with a single screenshot:

This is the third post in a series I recently started on software development and the role of the Product Manager.  If you haven’t already done so, it might be a good idea to read Part 1 (Overview) and Part 2 (How to ensure that product requirements are informed by user needs) before your read on.  This post continues the discussion on Product Requirements and the different sources that should feed into requirements.

In Part 2 of this series I discussed the role of user needs in product requirements, and in this article I’d like to talk about the role of business needs and technology needs, and making sure that the right balance is struck when incorporating these (often loud, often conflicting) voices in the organization into what gets built.  So, let’s dive in…

Business needs

When I was at eBay, we often heard the mantra from our executive team, “If you fix the user experience, you fix the business.”  Lovely words, but when it comes time to decide what to build, “Fix the business” usually comes first.  This is, of course, not a bad thing, but unfortunately the best user experience often means taking revenue-generating features out of the product.  Would we have banner ads if UX really was king?  Don’t think so…

Still, you have to make money.  That is, after all, the point of the business.  The trick is to understand the difference between good revenue streams and bad revenue streams, and opt for the good ones as much as possible.  A good case study on this is eBay’s interesting approach to photos in product listings on the site.  eBay started charging users to add photos to their  listings pretty much from the very beginning.  This was back in 1995, and in those days storage wasn’t dirt cheap, so it was a natural thing to do.

As the years went by, and more and more photo sharing services popped up that allows users to upload and stores pictures for free, this approach became increasingly frustrating for users.  The other side of the story is that it’s actually in eBay’s best interest for users to upload photos of their items — items with photos convert way better than those without photos.

Still, it took many months to convince the executive team to make it free for users to upload photos of their items.  This is an example of a bad revenue stream — it brings in money, but to the detriment of users and the overall success of the business.  When it comes to adding revenue streams to your product, the important question should always be: are you doing this so people will buy it, or are you doing this so people will want to use it and be willing to pay for it****?

In a recent interview on Microsoft and tablets, Steve Ballmer said the following:

And so we are working with [our] partners, not just to deliver something, but to deliver products that people really want to go buy.

And in that lies the core of what’s wrong with Microsoft — the difference between making products users want to buy vs. making products they want to use.  When you make products people want to use, charging for the value it brings (i.e., looking for good revenue streams), becomes so much easier.  Approaching it from the more negative side, I guess you could also say it like this:

Technology needs

One of the dangers of product roadmaps and the PM’s role is that back-end maintenance and optimization can start to take a back seat.  This is a huge mistake, best explained through the metaphor of technical debt. In Steve McConnel’s great post on this topic, he defines technical debt as follows:

The first kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred unintentionally. For example, a design approach just turns out to be error-prone or a junior programmer just writes bad code. This technical debt is the non-strategic result of doing a poor job.

The second kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred intentionally. This commonly occurs when an organization makes a conscious decision to optimize for the present rather than for the future. “If we don’t get this release done on time, there won’t be a next release” is a common refrain””and often a compelling one.

He goes on to explain why this can become a problem:

If the debt grows large enough, eventually the company will spend more on servicing its debt than it invests in increasing the value of its other assets. A common example is a legacy code base in which so much work goes into keeping a production system running (i.e., “servicing the debt”) that there is little time left over to add new capabilities to the system. With financial debt, analysts talk about the “debt ratio,” which is equal to total debt divided by total assets. Higher debt ratios are seen as more risky, which seems true for technical debt, too.

Technical debt isn’t always wrong — quick hacks to get a product out the door is often the right choice.  But as with most debt, it’s important to start paying it off in small chunks as soon as it’s incurred, before you get into too much trouble.  If you’re interested in this topic, also read Andrew Chen’s great post called Product Design debt vs. Technical Debt.

Striking the right balance

Now that we’ve discussed user needs, business needs, and technology needs, the obvious question is: how do you decide what to build now vs. later vs. not at all?

For that, the right answer is unfortunately, in my experience, the traditional cop-out answer: it depends. It depends mainly on the following factors (in no particular order):

• The level of user engagement and involvement.  If users are screaming for a particular feature, or if there are rumblings around “why haven’t you done anything for us recently?”, it could be a good time to up the level of customer needs you meet.
• The stage of the product in its lifecycle. If the product is just at the beginning, customer needs will most likely come first.  As the product matures, technology and business needs become more important and should start taking precedence.
• The financial state of the business.  If there are ways to add good revenue streams, those opportunities should always be taken.

Depending on where the business is on each of these 3 factors, the different inputs might be weighted differently. If the product is going through a growth spurt with lots of buzz, more attention could be placed on user needs. If the product is mature and making good money, technical needs might get more weight.

Exactly how this is balanced in each version/release of the product has no clear answer, and it’s where the art of product management comes in. But one thing is for sure — none of these needs can be ignored for any extended period of time. Take too long to pay down technical debt, and your platform will become bloated and unable to scale. Focus on making money too much, and users will fall out of love with your product.

Successful products have clear product management leaders who are able to take all the different requirements inputs, place it into context with other external and internal pressures, limits, and opportunities, and design a product vision and a (flexible) product roadmap that ultimately increases product/market fit (which I mentioned briefly in Part 2 of this series).

But what do product requirements look like, and what is the Product Manager’s role in that process?  That will be the topic of the next post…

I just read an interesting New York Times article on “social reading” (Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social), and it got me thinking about the future of reading, and the e-reader battle that’s currently going on, particularly between the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle.  And then I upgraded my Kindle software to v2.5 this morning, and it made it clear to me why I think the Kindle is a far superior reader to the iPad.

No one will deny that the iPad’s iBooks app has a nicer user experience than the Kindle.  It’s colorful and pretty, it has a nice bookshelf, you can turn the pages with your fingers, and, uh…  Well, that’s where it stops.  The two major issues with iBooks are:

• Since it’s a back lit display, it starts hurting your eyes when you read for too long.
• The battery life is, you know, not ideal…

Now consider the Kindle.  Though not as pretty to look at, you can tell that Amazon decided to focus on the reading experience.  You don’t have to plug it in all the time, and you can read it for hours without hurting your eyes.  But it is v2.5’s forays into social reading that really starts to set the device apart.  There are two features in particular that I think are brilliant:

• First, Amazon allows you to opt in to viewing popular highlights. This allows you to see when passages of a book you’re reading were highlighted by others who have read the same book.  It’s like a virtual book club, but instead of trying to get 6 people to agree on a book to read, you can connect with 100’s of readers who are already reading the same book.  This kind of connection really is where the Internet is at its most useful.
• Amazon also allows you to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to your Kindle.  This means that you can highlight a passage that you’re reading, and share it with your followers, like I did this morning:

That is powerful.  It not only allows you to share what you’re reading and thinking about in real time, but it’s also great business for Amazon, since it provides a way for your followers to purchase the book right away.  Of course, even the Kindle packaging tells you that this is an experience built around passionate readers:

The differences between the iPad and the Kindle have larger implication as well, particularly in the field of Product Management.  Look, the iPad is gorgeous, it really is.  But it is an experience designed to contain so many different uses, that it is not possible to focus on doing one particular thing (like reading a book) extremely well.  The Kindle is singularly focused on readers, and that is why it beats the iPad hands down as an e-reader.

Dropbox did exactly the same thing to beat out their competitors — they focused on making file sharing as easy and convenient as possible.  They didn’t have all the features, but they made sure the features they do have has a superior user experience.  On that note, if you haven’t watched this 23-minute talk by Dropbox’s CEO where he discusses their business model, you really should.  It is inspiring and well worth it.

Hey, South African tech industry?  Meet me behind the rugby field at 15:00.  We need to talk.

I’ve been back in South Africa for 3 months now after 6 years working in Silicon Valley, and I think I finally figured out what’s been bothering me about the tech industry here ever since I got back.  The problem is that we have some serious Goldilocks issues going on right now.

This one is too cold

The first problem we have is a severe inferiority complex.

Remember: just because we’re not in Silicon Valley doesn’t mean we don’t know what we’re doing.  Like Morpheus says in The Matrix: “Some things are true whether you believe in them or not.”  We’re good at what we do.  We’re really good.  Why does it matter if anyone knows it at this point?  They will, soon enough.

I know that many of those dudes in San Francisco treat us like the little brothers of the world — adorable but not to be taken seriously.  But that doesn’t mean we have to grovel.  Who cares what they think?  Haven’t you heard?  Silicon Valley is dead.  You can be brilliant anywhere.  So we might as well be brilliant in the most beautiful place on earth.

This one is too hot

But we also have a second problem.  Some of us tend to overcompensate.  You see, since we have this inferiority complex, there is a danger in wanting to “show them a thing or two.”  So we livetweet from events that we’re not attending.  We write reviews of products we haven’t seen.  We fight about what the definition of a startup is, as if that matters.  We show up at conferences and give talks on who we are instead of what others can learn from our experience.

No, not cool.  There is no need to overcompensate.  We have some very unique skills, and we have the benefit of the element of surprise.  No one thinks the next Facebook is going to come from South Africa.  Let’s keep it that way — don’t let them know we’re here!

This one is just right

But there is an alternative.  We can make great products, build great companies, and take over the world without anyone even knowing where we’re from.  Does it matter where WooThemes are from?  It matters to us.  It doesn’t matter to anyone they sell their products to.

So, please.  Stop being apologetic about our skills.  Stop wishing we were Silicon Valley.  Stop pretending to be in Silicon Valley.

Instead, follow Seth’s advice.  And forgive me for quoting verbatim, but no one says this better than him:

Yes, I know you’re a master of the web, that you’ve visited every website written in English, that you’ve been going to SXSW for ten years, that you were one of the first bloggers, you used Foursquare before it was cool and you can code in HTML in your sleep. Yes, I know that you sit in the back of the room tweeting clever ripostes when speakers are up front failing on a panel and that you had a LOLcat published before they stopped being funny.

But what have you shipped?

What have you done with your connection skills that has been worthy of criticism, that moved the dial and that changed the world?

Go, do that.